"elastix: a toolbox for intensity-based medical image registration"

Stefan Klein*, Marius Staring*, Keelin Murphy, Max A. Viergever and Josien P.W. Pluim

*In alphabetical order. Both authors contributed equally.

Abstract

Medical image registration is an important task in medical image processing. It refers to the process of aligning data sets, possibly from different modalities (e.g., magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT)), different time points (e.g., follow-up scans), and/or different subjects (in case of population studies). A large number of methods for image registration are described in the literature. Unfortunately, there is not one method that works for all applications. We have therefore developed elastix, a publicly available computer program for intensity-based medical image registration. The software consists of a collection of algorithms that are commonly used to solve medical image registration problems. The modular design of elastix allows the user to quickly configure, test, and compare different registration methods for a specific application. The command-line interface enables automated processing of large numbers of data sets, by means of scripting. The usage of elastix for comparing different registration methods is illustrated with three example experiments, in which individual components of the registration method are varied.

Source code

The source code of the methods described in this paper can be found in the image registration toolkit elastix, available at https://github.com/SuperElastix/elastix.

The exact parameter settings used in this paper can be found at the parameter file database of elastix at entry Par0001, Par0002 and Par0003.

BibTeX entry